Spam, laborious spam, to stay on the menu

Spam will peak at 80 per cent of all emails by 2007 and Australia's anti-spam legislation will do little to protect local inboxes, according to an anti-spam expert.

The torrent of offers for cheap medication and bogus diplomas will only subside when the combination of spam filtering and user awareness makes sending spam unprofitable, says S2 Intelligence analyst Bruce McCabe.

After plateauing by 2007, spam rates will not return to last month's level of 60 per cent until approximately 2010. About this time, structural changes to the internet such as tracking and authentication mechanisms should accelerate the decline but spam will never be eliminated, according to McCabe's report, The Future of Spam.

Australia's anti-spam legislation - due to come into effect on April 11 - will increase the marketing costs for small businesses by forcing them to revert to telemarketing and hardcopy mailouts, McCabe says.

The legislation will have "no measurable impact" on Category 1 spam - emails without legitimate sender information, often fraudulent or offensive, and sent to millions of recipients.

It will cause a "real and substantial reduction" in Category 2, 3 and 4 spam. Category 2 is similar to Category 1 but senders do not hide their identity, Category 3 is unsolicited multi-recipient emails from mainstream companies and Category 4 is unwanted multi-recipient emails sent by friends, colleagues and associates.

Structural changes to the internet required to combat spam are at least five years away, McCabe says. "Tracking and authentication measures score poorly, however, when it comes to the practicalities and challenges of implementing," he says.

"To work, they must become part of the routine background handling of all email transactions. This, essentially, means structural change to the internet and depends heavily on uniform agreement on some form of global public key infrastructure."

"Human challenge-response will play a niche role but is to be discounted as a broader anti-spam mechanism," McCabe says. "The concept of charging micropayments for emails is severely flawed and will not find support. Similar mechanisms that use CPU-time as a currency may find acceptance but are unlikely to play any serious role for at least three years."

McCabe's report comes as anti-spam vendor Brightmail announced a Brightmail Logistics Operations Centre in Sydney to complement its operations in Taipei, Dublin and San Francisco.

Asia is expected to account for more than 15 per cent of global spam by 2006, says Brightmail president and chief executive Enrique Salem.

The Sydney centre, due to be operational by April, will work with the recently opened Taipei centre to target Asian spam. A third of Brightmail resources will be in this region by the end of the year, says Brightmail Asia-Pacific vice-president Garry Sexton.

"It's the increase in double-byte spam and the enormous uptake in internet usage in the region that has led Brightmail to deploy a Brightmail Logistics and Operation Centre in both Taiwan and Sydney," Sexton says.

"Not only are we seeing spam rates explode, we're also witnessing a shift in sophistication and significant growth in double-byte character spam originating from Asia."